Updated 18th May 2021
UNSAFE – DO NOT TRESPASS – The caretaker will call the police. Asbestos everywhere.
This is the original site of the Queen Victoria Sanitorium and Hospital and is 372.00ha (919.23 acres). Here: https://w3w.co/curbed.villagers.saturate
The original house on the property was built for Kelso King (1853-1943), knighted in 1929, a prominent Sydney businessman, with fingers in many corporate pies, such as insurance, banking, pastoralism, mining and coastal shipping. Around 1890 King and his first wife, Irene Rand, acquired the land which lay mostly on the Tableland but included part of Kedumba Walls and Kedumba Valley below. The Kings built a country retreat on this relatively remote spot, perhaps encouraged by the name Kings Tableland (although the King was not Kelso but George III).
After Kelso’s wife Irene died in 1900, King sold his Tableland house and land to the Committee of the Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee Homes for Consumptives Fund, a charity that provided facilities and medical treatment for tuberculosis patients, known as consumptives. Medical opinion at the time deemed the climate and fresh air in the Blue Mountains ideal for consumptives, and the Committee built the first of a total three tuberculosis sanatoria based in the Blue Mountains.
The other two sanatoria being Boddington Hospital (now an aged care facility), and the R.T. Hall Home in Hazelbrook (previously the Hall for Children, now Korowal School). All of the three sanatoria were designed by George Sydney Jones who was the son of the leading medical expert on consumption at the time, Dr Philip Sydney Jones. The hospital would continue to be developed and improved by George until 1921.
In 1903 the building was opened to 20 male patients and was run by Dr Malcolm Sinclaire. The hospital was completely self-sufficient, providing facilities for cattle, pigs and poultry. An extensive dam was also built on-site.
In 1911 the Queen Victoria Sanatorium acquired state funding, and became a hospital under the State Hospitals Act, which lead to improvements, renovations and a much larger patient base.
The complex had a checkered history and was a chest hospital until 1958 when it was
converted to a hospital for the aged and chronically ill. In 1988 the management of the home was taken over by the Wentworth Area Health Service. It continued as a nursing home until its closure in May 1999.
The last we heard was that it was sold as a development site in 2012.
Some photos are copyright © ABANDONED BLUE MOUNTAINS
